Todd Clarke's Technology Corner v2.0

was just released in the COmmercial Investment Real Estate Journal.

There were kind enough to quote me on how I use google voice (one of my favorite tools).
CIREJulAug11p20-TechSolutions

For the last three years, our family has taken a 21 to 30 day trip every summer across the nation. First year we did most of the states either side of the 35th parallel from NM to NC. Last year we hit most of the national parks west of the Mississippi. This year we headed north and east and saw the Cosmosphere in Kansas, President Truman’s house/library, President Hoover’s Library, the Ford factory (where we saw them build Ford F150 pickup trucks), President Ford’s library, Lake Michigan, Lake Huron, Lake Erie, the Erie Canal (road a bike through the locks), Susan B Anthony’s house, The Hudson river valley artists houses, Theodore Roosevelt inauguration house, Niagara Falls, FDR’s House/library, Gettysburg, a coal mine, the Walton’s house, and Thomas Jefferson’s house and many other places.

Part of the adventure for us is to camp along the way – our kids have become masters at setting up and taking down their tents, while we stay in the diminutive teardrop trailer. Since we both basically work for ourselves, working these trips is a bit more challenging than when I travel to teach (and have a hotel or classroom to office out of).

Clients and friends often ask – “where do you work on the road?”

This panoramic photo gives you a pretty good idea!

Yes that is my laptop on the small table on the side of the teardrop. Last summer, we rewired the little guy teardrop trailer to run off of a portable rechargeable battery and to plug into the “shore” power we might find at some campgrounds. The rechargeable battery provides 8 hours of uninterrupted iPhone charging, iPad charging, lights for the cabin, lights for the kitchen area and laptop plug in power.

If you need to have the Internet with you while you travel, there are a number of options from tethering your mobile phone, to portable Wi-Fi like devices to a tetherless iPhone that acts like a Wi-Fi Router.

IREM recently had me review some of the latest and greatest tools in their Journal of Property Management, a publication of the Institute of Real Estate and Management for publishing our article on mobile internet devices. The article compares hardware, speeds, and services offered by the major mobile phone operators.

I recently came across Microsoft’s PhotoSynth for the iPhone/iPad. This app “assembles” live photographs into a mosaic or collage of photos.

Here is a before and after shot of the auditorium at the Bank of America headquarters in Charlotte, NC.

Before my class started:

and during the class:

I’ve also used the tool to turn otherwise dull photos of properties into something that interests the viewer – like this one: